Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab
The Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab (HQO) is a state-of-the-art health services research group that produces actionable evidence to improve the quality, equity, and resilience of healthcare delivery systems.
677 Huntington Ave.
Kresge Building, 4th Floor
Boston, MA
Our Team
Faculty Directors
Jose F. Figueroa, MD, MPH co-directs the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard Chan School and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also a practicing internist and associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he serves as faculty director of the BWH Medicine Residency Management & Leadership Pathway.
Dr. Figueroa’s main research interests focus on understanding the drivers of healthcare spending and poor clinical outcomes among older, vulnerable populations with complex needs. To date, this has included work on racial and ethnic minorities, dual-eligible Medicare-Medicaid beneficiaries, and people with disabilities, frailty, HIV, and serious mental illness. His research also focuses on evaluating policy interventions and payment reform aimed at improving quality of care and controlling costs, with a particular focus on how these reforms affect safety-net providers and hospitals.
Thomas C. Tsai, MD, MPH co-directs the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard Chan School and associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Tsai’s research focuses on understanding the impact of health policy efforts on achieving value in our healthcare system by reducing spending and improving outcomes. He leads a breadth of projects bridging clinical medicine, health policy, and public health through three key portfolios: healthcare quality and equity; health policy evaluation; and health system resilience.
From 2014 to 2015, he served as a senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the Office of Health Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2022 to 2023, he served as senior policy advisor for the COVID-19 Response in the Biden Administration and the testing and treatment coordinator on the White House COVID-19 Response team, where he led the efforts to bring the country out of the public health emergency by increasing equitable and widescale access to diagnostics and treatments.
Faculty and Research Scientists
Laura Burke is a practicing emergency physician and health services researcher whose work centers on measuring and understanding the factors driving the cost and quality of emergency care, particularly for older adults. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and completed her emergency medicine residency at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)–Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency. Following her training at BIDMC, Dr. Burke was awarded a Zuckerman Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership and earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Burke remained on faculty at BIDMC as an academic attending for 15 years, providing clinical care at BIDMC and affiliated community hospitals while pursuing a career in health services research. Her work has been funded by the Emergency Medicine Foundation, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Board of Medical Specialties, and the National Institute on Aging. She is currently the principal investigator of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) R01 grant investigating the epidemiology of diagnostic error in emergency care.
Austin Frakt, PhD, is Vice President and Chief Research Officer with the Joint Commission. He is also Associate Director of the Partnered Evidence-based Policy Resource Center at the VA Boston Healthcare System, Principal Research Scientist with the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Editor in Chief of Health Services Research.
Dr. Frakt is the founding Editor in Chief of the evidence-based health policy blog The Incidental Economist. He also serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Managed Care and is a member of the New England Comparative Effectiveness Public Advisory Council.
Dr. Frakt received his Ph.D. from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in statistical and applied mathematics and his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in Applied and Engineering Physics.
Dr. Miranda Lam is a radiation oncologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and health policy researcher. Her research is focused on understanding the various factors that impact the care patients with cancer receive. She has studied various topics, including the impact of various components of the Affordable Care Act (Accountable Care Organizations, Medicaid expansion) on spending and mortality for patients with cancer, disparities in cancer care, and changes to the oncology care landscape (practice consolidation, price transparency, oncology alternative payment models).
She received her MD from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and her MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Yanlei Ma, PhD is a research associate with the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Ma received her PhD in Economics from Cornell University and was a research fellow at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute prior to joining this group. Her work has been published in Health Affairs, Medical Care, JAMA Network Open, Obstetrics & Gynecology, among other journals.
E. John Orav, PhD is an associate professor of medicine and of biostatistics at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Orav has extensive experience in clinical trials, health services research, and program evaluation. His current projects focus on the special care needs of older patients with dementia, those living in nursing homes, and those receiving care in the emergency room and the in-patient setting. He is an advisor to the Mongan Institute Center for Aging and Serious Illness at the Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as the U.S. Health and Human Services office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. He has been actively engaged for over 35 years in teaching and mentoring physicians entering academic careers at Harvard and in related programs in Buenos Aires, Moscow, and Beirut.
Dr. Renee N. Salas is the founding director of The Cooperative at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is the co-director of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Group’s Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Initiative and founded the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change U.S. Brief Working Group. She engages in research to explore how climate change is impacting the healthcare system.
Dr. Salas was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in 2021 for her work in climate change and health and serves as the Climate Change Interest Group Chair. She is on the Steering Committee for the NAM Grand Challenge on Climate Change, Health, and Equity, and serves on the Advisory Committee for The National Academies Climate Crossroads initiative.
Dr. Salas is an emergency medicine physician in the Center for Social Justice and Health Equity in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and holds a variety of affiliations across Harvard University. She received her MD from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine with an MS in Clinical Research from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She earned her MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with a concentration in environmental health.
Staff
Ryan C. Burke is the lead biostatistician in the Emergency Medicine Research Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Ryan collaborates with HqO faculty on emergency medicine health services research projects, focusing on care trends and health outcomes among Medicare beneficiaries. At BIDMC she advises researchers on study design and implementation, oversees study data acquisition, and leads data analyses. Her research interests include methodological issues with using administrative data for research, improving care and outcomes for emergency department patients, and the intersection between emergency care and women’s health. Ryan received a PhD in Epidemiology from Kent State University and an MPH in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Saint Louis University.
Josh joins the lab from a strategy consulting background. He has worked with several of the country’s largest local governments on strategic public health initiatives such as opioid abatement. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Quantitative Social Science, where his thesis about measuring heroin use during the Covid-19 pandemic earned departmental honors.
Brianna Hardy is a Statistical Programmer and Analyst for the lab and the department of Health Policy and Management. She received her Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Bryant University, with concentrations in Applied Analytics and Data Mining. She previously was a Research Programmer for The Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and a healthcare actuarial analyst for AllWays Health Partners. She enjoys making data informed inferences to improve healthcare quality outcomes for all.
Deb Hollett is a staff assistant responsible for administrative tasks and supporting senior faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before joining the team, she worked as an IT professional and a religious education leader. She graduated from UMass Boston with a dual degree in Psychology and Theatre Arts.
Jessica Phelan, MS is the assistant director of analytics for the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab, where she works with faculty on statistical analysis for various research projects and is responsible for the management of shared data resources. She enjoys working through complicated data questions as well as training other analysts on the wide array of data we have access to on our team. She received an MS in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Georgetown University.
Tori earned her BA in International Relations and Economics from Boston University. After graduating, she worked at RAND in DC & Boston where she focused on emerging technologies, issues of equity across the US government, as well as cost estimation and modeling.
She then pursued her dream of becoming a pastry chef! She obtained her Diploma in Patisserie from Le Cordon Bleu in London and spent an additional year working in country club and Michelin star kitchens before pivoting back to policy. She joined HQO in November 2024.
Bekka Stein is a research assistant and statistical programmer in the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab who studied Mathematics and Public Policy at Carleton College. Since joining the lab in 2023, she has worked on projects regarding plan choice and care quality for dual-eligible Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries as well as service utilization and outcomes in the Veterans Health Administration. Bekka is passionate about investigating health disparities and studying mitigating policies. Before joining the lab, she worked as a research assistant for the Harvard Opinion Research Program.
Jie Zheng, PhD is the associate director of analytics for the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab. For the past twenty-seven years, she has served as the lead statistical analyst on projects utilizing Medicare claims, Medicare encounter data, Minimum Data Set, American Hospital Association survey data, and other publicly available datasets to evaluate health care quality, cost, measurement, and policy. Her co-authored work has been published in journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, Annals of Surgery, Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Circulation, Health Services Research, The BMJ, and Healthcare, among others.
Affiliated Faculty
Nicholas L. Berlin, MD, MPH, MS, is a surgeon in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a health services researcher focusing on delivery systems innovations, Medicare payment reform, and the affordability of healthcare. Prior to coming to Boston, he completed the National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy. He holds an MPH in statistics and epidemiology from Yale University and an MS in health and healthcare research from the University of Michigan.
Melissa Garrido is a health economist, director of the Partnered Evidence-Based Policy Resource Center (PEPReC) at the Boston VA Healthcare System, senior research scientist at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and eesearch professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Dr. Garrido has expertise in econometrics, evidence-based policy, geriatrics, palliative care, and behavioral health care. Her research centers around the theme of developing and applying rigorous analytic methods to inform policy and resource allocation decisions. She is a senior associate editor at Health Services Research and is a member of the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC) and the Federal Interagency Council on Evaluation Policy.
Dr. Garrido received her PhD in Health Services Research, Policy, and Administration from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and completed an NIMH postdoctoral traineeship in mental health services research at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University.
Irene Papanicolas is the director of the Center for Health System Sustainability (CHeSS) and professor of health services, policy and practice at the Brown School of Public Health.
Irene’s research is focused on assessing the performance of health systems and furthering the use of health system comparisons to draw insights for national policy makers. Irene leads the International Collaborative on Costs, Outcomes and Needs in Care (ICCONIC) in collaboration with Dr. Jose Figueroa. The ICCONIC Collaborative consists of 16 partners from across North America, Europe and the Pacific who work together to understand patters of health service utilization, costs and outcomes for a clinically diverse group of high-need, high-cost patients.
Affiliated Fellows, Trainees, & Students
Adam Beckman, MD, MBA is a physician dedicated to strengthening primary care and safety-net systems. He is a primary care resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Brookside Community Health Center. Previously, he served as the Special Advisor to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy during the Covid-19 pandemic. He has co-authored more than forty articles about health policy and public health including in JAMA, The Lancet, and Health Affairs. Adam received his MBA with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School, earned his MD with magna cum laude and honors distinctions from Harvard Medical School, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, STAT Wunderkind, and the national recipient of the United States Public Health Service Excellence in Public Health Award.
Alex Dong is a medical student at Harvard whose research focuses on healthcare delivery, Medicare payment reform, and the affordability of healthcare. Alex graduated magna cum laude from Yale College with a double-major in Biomedical Engineering and the Humanities. In addition to his health policy research, Alex is passionate about surgical innovation and science communication. Prior to medical school, he worked as an Editorial Intern at Fast Company, served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Scientific Magazine, and was named a Yale Journalism Scholar.
Shira Hornstein is a student in the MD-PhD program at Harvard Medical School. Her research interests include public opinion and health messaging, particularly related to substance use policy, harm reduction, and reproductive access. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2021 with dual B.A.s in Government and Biology. At Dartmouth, Shira’s projects included investigating the effects of perfluoroalkyl substances on breastfeeding and examining the impact of political messaging during COVID-19 on public opinion through a survey experiment and interviews with politicians from three U.S. states. Before starting her MD-PhD in 2022, Shira spent a gap year at MGH’s Cancer Outcomes Research and Education Center.
Kimtee Kundu is a research intern in the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab, where she studies Medicare, Medicaid, and healthcare privatization. Her work focuses on health policy, healthcare outcomes, and rural health disparities. Previously, she was a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Center for Evidence-Based Imaging, working on a project aimed at improving diagnostic accuracy and reducing unnecessary imaging. She is currently a senior at Harvard College pursuing an A.B. in Government and the History of Science, and her thesis examines the political development of rural health policy in the United States.
Tarun Ramesh is an MD candidate at Harvard Medical School and has worked as a research assistant for Dr. Tom Tsai since 2021. Tarun graduated summa cum laude from the University of Georgia with majors in economics and genetics. He studies healthcare consolidation, provider workforce, and rural health. He has published over a dozen first author articles, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and JAMA Internal Medicine. His research on the visa policies for international medical graduates was recognized as one of the best abstracts by the 2023 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting. He has worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the DHHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the Center for American Progress, and the Roosevelt Institute.
William Roberts, MBA, MSc, joins us as a Chief Operating Officer from within the UK National Health Service, leading a health care system providing community and hospital care for a population of 300,000 people. William is currently a Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy & Practice with the Commonwealth Fund. Previously, he worked for the former Director-General of Health for New Zealand. His research is focused on the role of reimbursement approaches on access to health care.
William received his MBA within an Award of Excellence from University College London, and his MSc in International Health Policy & Health Economics from the London School of Economics. William is also alumnus of the International Hospital Federations’ Young Executive Leaders program.
Bassel Shanab is a Sarnoff Fellow from the Yale School of Medicine. He holds a BA in Biological Sciences and Global Health Studies from Northwestern University. His academic interests include cardiovascular disease, social determinants of health, health disparities, health policy, and healthcare administration.
Julia H. Song, MD is a general surgery resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her research primarily focuses on assessing the impact of Medicare Advantage on quality of and access to surgical care. She received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School and A.B. in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is also currently pursuing an M.P.H. at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
David Velasquez, MD, MBA, MPP, is an internal medicine resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
His main research interests focus on understanding the policies, systems, and structures that affect the health of vulnerable communities. This has included writing and research on people experiencing homelessness, people with a non-English language preference, people with a high level of social needs, older adults with frailty, the uninsured population, and low-income communities. Dr. Velasquez has also collaborated with organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to improve healthcare access and delivery for vulnerable populations.
Dr. Velasquez received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and his M.P.P. from Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern California with a B.S. in Human Biology.